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Google has centered itself as the undisputed leader in the online industry and at least some part of our daily online activity is dependent on Google’s services whether that’s Google Chrome, Google Search, YouTube or anything else. Probably the most used Google service on the planet is Google search. Google Search has captured more than 92% of the market share which means billions of people are using it on a daily basis. That gives Google too much control and power and it utilizes it by capturing an enormous amount of data on its users. If you don’t want any part of it, you should use a Google Search alternative. With that in mind, we have created a list of 12 best search engines that you can use as Google alternative.

Why the need for Google Search Alternative?

Although Google is the de facto industry standard for web search and is also used as a verb for web search engine, it has got some kinks to it. The major concern has to do with privacy as being an ad company at its core, Google continuously collects data on its users. Google also has numerous accusations for manipulating search results in their own favor.

Yelp even went on to hire Tim Wu, the father of net neutrality to prove that Google’s search results are biased. Also, Google has been displaying a major portion of the search results bombarded with ads. The death of white space and ad-infused Google is not what many online users would wish for.

If you value your online privacy and enjoy an ad-free experience, it would do you good to look at some of the best Google Alternatives that you can use.

Best Search Engines to Use as Google Alternative in 2019

So, whatever your case might be, if you are looking for a better alternative to the ubiquitous Google Search, here are the 12 Best Google Alternatives.

1. Bing

Although Bing is nowhere as big as it once was, it still remains one of the best Google alternatives on the market right now. Not only it brings tons of features but it also looks good. Bing’s homepage has an ever-changing background consisting of places, animals, people, sports, etc. Some of the key capabilities of Bing include the ability to use operating calculations, quick sports scores, flight tracking, products shopping, translate, conversions, spell check and more.

Bing does feature Bing Ads, Bing Events, Bing Finance and more according to the task at hand. However, you can set preferences for most of them and they are not as annoying as Google Search ads. Bing also integrates easily with Facebook and into Apple and Windows-based devices. Also featuring its own standalone mobile applications, Bing is easily a viable Google alternative.

2. DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is one of the fastest growing web search engines, which has gained particularly because of its plans on maintaining user privacy. DuckDuckGo aggregates its results from many different sources and it does not keep track of your searches. DuckDuckGo aggregates results from over 100 different sources including DuckDuck bot which is its own web crawler, various crowd-sourced sites, Bing, Yandex and more. It then displays them privately to the end user. This is entirely open-source and the code is even available on GitHub.

DuckDuckGo features strictly one-ad-a-page revenue model. Its proxy based search engine meant that the user’s search queries are left untracked. It also features a Voice Search. All in all, DuckDuckGo quickly gained attention from users who were not willing to sacrifice their privacy on the web. Recently, Mozilla Firefox has been added with DuckDuckGo as a search option for the user.

3. Search Encrypt

Search Encrypt takes online tracking prevention to the next level by not only blocking online trackers but also using local encryption to secure yoursearches. It uses both industry standard AES-256 bit encryption along with Secure Sockets Layer encryption for total protection. That means not only your searches and other web activities are secure from online snoopers but they are also not available to local users who have access to your computer. Whether you share your computer with someone or it just gets stolen, you can be sure that your internet activities will be accessible to no one.

Search Encrypt also offers privacy protected maps and video searches. The company is using Open Street Maps as its maps provider so your details are not being shared with Google. It also allows you to see videos in an enhanced privacy mode which blocks pre-roll ads while protecting your privacy. Of course, with all these privacy standards, you will not get search results which are as good as Google Search. Still, its a viable Google alternative for anyone who is looking for extreme privacy.

4. Qwant

Qwant is yet another-privacy focused search engine which promises never to save your search data or harvest your personal data for ad targeting. Despite being privacy-friendly, Quant is quite rich in features. One of my favorite features of Quant is its “quick search shortcuts” feature which lets you quickly search for products and content on specific websites like YouTube, Amazon, and more.

For example, I can type the keyword “&a” and type my search query after that. When I hit enter, Quant will use my search query to directly search Amazon’s catalog. I also love Quant’s Panoramic search feature which basically means that Qwant delivers all its results on a single web page whether they are websites, social networks, pictures, videos, shopping, music, and more. Overall, I quite like Qwant and its search results are also quite accurate. You should definitely check it out.

5. Yahoo! Search

After playing trials with different search engines to power their own Web search, Yahoo! have now partnered up with Microsoft to use Bing search results for their web engine. Now powered entirely by Bing, Yahoo! Search provides access in up to 38 International languages..

It doesn’t make sense for normal users to hand over all of their online data to Google, and Yahoo! Search does feel like a good Google alternative. Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Finance are a wealth of information on niche topics and now the recent purchase and integration of Flickr made them even with Google on the Image front. Yahoo! still offers a better privacy to their users and Yahoo Local and Yahoo Weather are other most often used services.

6. Wolfram Alpha

If you are under the impression that Wolfram Alpha is just for the Math geeks, think again. Although it is primarily a computational algorithm mechanism, it is also a powerful search engine. Wolfram Alpha mainly curates its data, instead of just caching web pages. This search engine curates data from a lot of reputed and trustworthy college publications/libraries, Crunchbase, FAA, Best Buy and many other sources.

Wolfram Alpha comes up with results which are computational facts. On the home screen are some of the examples of searches through which Wolfram Alpha could assist in. If you look up a University on Wolfram Alpha, it curates all of the key information like the Enrollment numbers/Tuition Fees/location, etc. and all the essential data curated and presented in a single spot. While I understand that this will not serve as a viable Google Search alternative for many users, it is in fact better than Google if you meet its user criteria.

7. StartPage

IxQuick was one of the few search engines on the market which showed its own results on the page and didn’t send the query to another search engine. Later, IxQuick launched a second search engine called StartPage which used to include Google’s search results but didn’t allow Google to tracks its users. Finally, both these search engines merged into one and now operate under the same name. With this merger, users’ are supposedly getting the best of both worlds.

On one hand, you are not being tracked while on the other and you are receiving accurate search results as they are being pulled directly from Google Search. None of this is illegal as StartPage is paying Google to access its search results and removing the trackers. StartPage neither stores users’ data nor lets websites track them. It brings a feature called “Anonymous View” which protects users from websites when they click on any search result. If you want privacy but don’t want to deal with sub-par search results, you should be using StartPage.

8. Yandex

Yandex is a Russian-based company providing Search and other such services on the web. With over 150 Million search queries operated per day by Yandex, it is one of the largest Web Search engine in the World and the leading search engine in Russia. While Yandex collects user’s data, the company is quite transparent and let users know what kind of data they are collecting how they are using it. The company assures that your data is not accessible by individuals and all your private data like passwords are encrypted.

Yandex provides its users with lots of services like Images, Videos, Mail, Maps, Metrica (Equivalent of Google Analytics) and Yandex browser; in addition to its Mobile apps, Yandex Disk (Cloud storage), Translate, Market, Money and more. These full-fledged services offered by Yandex make it easily one of the best alternatives to Google. If you want to remove Google completely from your life, you can surely look at Yandex as an alternative.

9. Dogpile

Dogpile is one of the oldest web search engines to curate information, links, images and videos from other search engines. Dogpile curates results for your search terms by fetching links from Google, Yahoo, Yandex and other such services. Although initially it fetched links from AskJeeves (now Ask.com) and Bing, it has now went on to add more web engines to fetch links, videos and images from.

Some of the key features offered by Dogpile include Categories, White pages, Preferences, Search filters, Recent searches, favorite fetches and more. Dogpile also has its own toolbar for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, which provides users an alternative search from their web browser.

10. Gibiru

While all of the above Google Alternative services tackled the issue of Privacy, Gibiru takes on Censored content. Do you happen to know that most of the content you look up online is presented after the removal of censored content? Gibiru pulls up all search results, including the ones which are censored for the general audience. While doing so, the issue of privacy is also well-tackled through its anonymous proxy search engine.

Gibiru crawls mainstream media for your search query and presents the uncensored results to the end user. Providing complete privacy and uncensored content, Gibiru is by far the best Google Alternative as far as Internet activists are concerned. Gibiru also has a Mozilla Firefox extension, to make the search for Uncensored content painless.

11. Ask.com

Ask.com is still more of a question-answer community rather than a full-blown search engine, but you could find answers to a wide variety of search queries here. While Ask.com closed its doors on Web search in 2009 to become completely focused on its original mission of providing a Questions-and-Answer community, it seems that it is including search results again.

You can find topics ranging from Art & Literature, Geography, Education and Politics to Technology, Science and Business queries answered here. Ask.com is one of the great alternatives to Google in the sense of finding human-edited content that is strictly to the point and is better organized.

12 Internet Archive

Although technically not a web search engine, Internet Archive does let users search for iterations of a website in the past. You can check how a website looked in the past, of your choice of selected date. Apart from just browsing through older iterations of websites, the Internet Archive is also a great source for millions of public books, images, software, movies, videos and much more.

You get unprecedented access to all of these resources for free on Internet Archive. Some of the classic movies and novels are up for grabs via Internet Archive. This non-profit digital library is a member of International Preservation Consortium, and this network crawls the web and archives valuable pieces of information. I see this one as a Google alternative for users who want access to data that are hard to find on Google itself.

BONUS

1. YouTube for Video Search

While a lot was talked about web search engines, where you enter a text manually, Google’s YouTube is by far the most popular website for searching videos on the web. The second largest search engine on the web, only second to Google, YouTube has the biggest collection of videos. You may also look into other Video search alternatives like Yahoo View,Facebook Watch, Vimeo, and more for your Video searches.

2. TinEye for Search by Images

For Reverse searching of images, that is, to search for content by uploading an image, TinEyeis one of the best services. You can also find some alternatives to TinEye by visiting our best reverse image search engines and mobile applications article.

3. Search for Mobile

Out of the services listed above, many of them do offer their own standalone mobile applications. You can make use of these applications to search directly from your mobile application. You can find both Android and iOS mobile applications for DuckDuckGo, Wolfram Alpha, Yahoo! Search, Bing, Yandex, Ask Mobile, Dogpile and more.

Are Your Happy with These Google Alternative Search Engines?

Now that we’ve come to the end of the best Google Alternative article, how many of these search engines have caught your attention? Do check them out and let us know which Google alternative search engine are you going to use. Also, if we missed any search engine which should be on the list but isn’t, let us know in the comments section down below.